DD spellings way too hard - Y2

[drspouse]

DD is in Y2 and has mild SEN, she's just moved onto Orange band reading books, passed her phonics check (bear in mind it was in Nov not June) and the Maths app school uses is really hard to manage and doesn't work on a tablet so we pay for Doodle Maths and she's behind Y2 expectations but making progress.
She has a list of spellings from school every week and a spelling test and the week before half term it included effect/affect, and a couple of others.
She doesn't have a clue what either of those mean and we've had words before that she would NEVER use in her spoken language and would struggle with if she saw them written.
I am aware that these might be on the NC Y2 list but I assume they are supposed to differentiate work for her.
We have decided to get her a subscription to Doodle Spelling and did a baseline assessment for her, she was struggling with -ue and -ew and similar which are Y1 spellings so it gave her them to learn and she's done very well over half term so far.
How would you put this to school? They have put her in an extra spelling group at the end of the day and told her to keep asking Mummy and Daddy to practice her school spellings but she just didn't get them and/or wouldn't remember them because she'd never use them (We have been trying to practice them but we have to explain what many of them mean, and they just make no sense to her, so we get tears. We haven't been completely ignoring the school spelling lists, just so you know).
DH suggested saying "we noticed she's struggling with spellings so we're using an app that takes her back to basics a bit" but I'm worried they will still try to emotionally blackmail her to "tell mummy and daddy that you MUST do the school spellings".
What else could we say?
I'm not sure why they think it's OK to give her reading books that are at her level but not spellings!

(PS an academic friend told me she'd marked a student essay that didn't know the difference between effect/affect...)

I'm a new TA and have recently been given training in spelling interventions and one of the things I was told was to never remove a child from a spelling session in school because you just don't know what might stick and may miss something clicking for her. So by not exposing her to the spellings/new words she is given she stands less chance in closing the gap. While she may not understand the words effect and affect, and you can help her here, you can emphasise the different sounds which will help train her ears to the different sounds.

By all means reiterate to the school that she finds these words challenging and may not do well in a test and also anything else that you notice as it will help them personalise her learning.

I would prefer (and think it much more productive) to give her spellings at her personal edge of development (I know there's a fancy phrase). I'm not going to ask them to remove her from that group unless of course there IS another group or they can think of a better way to teach her.

It's the "mummy Mr X says I must do my spellings, you must do the school spellings" weeping and wailing I'm trying to avoid.

I don't really see that giving her spellings that are impossible is better for "closing the gap" than giving her spellings that she can have some chance of having a stab at.
They wouldn't suggest she immediately move up to reading Harry Potter and keep bashing at it even if she had no clue, would they? Given where she is reading-wise?

Another TA here She sounds like she is doing well with regards to the phonics assessment and reading band. I think communication between yourself and the teacher is key here to address your concerns. Are you able to arrange a 10 minute meeting with the teacher after pick up? Our school has designated days for each class teacher to be available after school, sometimes a quick chat at drop off is all that's needed but this sounds like you need to sit down and have a proper discussion, or of course a phonecall.

After school is hard (clubs, her brother is at a different school) but we could try for a phone call.

Is spelling not differentiated? When my Ds was at school there were kids who had 20/10/5 to learn. He was in the 5 group but the spellings were so hard and he was dyslexic so that he rarely got 1/5.

The school didn't do any spelling intervention until y5. He was in an intervention group with others who struggled with spelling and they had special spelling classes with a TA so that they could raise scores for y6 SATS

@TotorosCatBus

Is spelling not differentiated? When my Ds was at school there were kids who had 20/10/5 to learn. He was in the 5 group but the spellings were so hard and he was dyslexic so that he rarely got 1/5.

The school didn't do any spelling intervention until y5. He was in an intervention group with others who struggled with spelling and they had special spelling classes with a TA so that they could raise scores for y6 SATS

I don't think it is. We can only see one list on Showbie, and the same list comes home and it's just labelled Y2 spellings. When DS was at the same school in Y1 (and you couldn't read any of his letters, and they refused to let him do it with magnetic letters) they all did the same list too. At least they aren't doing Y2 SATS this year...

Dc school doesnt do spellings till y3 and do where they only have to do certain ones. Though presumably all her class try 10.
Tbh i dont know a/effect.
Im sure you do this but

• do you read harder books with her so maybe read her the books others in her class are reading. So her comprehension/word knowledge etc improves.

Obviously i dont know re the sen though.

Ive been looking at y6 sats and the spellings are not explicitly taught. Some were from yr 4/5 etc.
I think there is nothing wrong in everyone doing the same spellings as the variation will be huge. But using the memory will improve it.
I find writing stuff is the best way. I managed to learn languages/science etc by just repeatedly writing it down as your hand remembers it. Even pages of latin.
I have a very bad short term memory.
If nothing else in yr 2 the practising helps with handwriting...
I do think it's unfair though. Dc1 doesnt even review the spellings just whatever they do at school and generally gets 10.

Spellings should be differentiated!
We have up to 4 groups with different words for each group!
I’m a teacher myself and I’d still Say this sounds a bit lazy. You need to flag it with school and see what they say then go from there.

Even if they are differentiated they are too hard for her...

Work should be challenging yet attainable

I think rather than trying to explain to her what the words mean, you need to try and bring them into her vocabulary first by using them a lot yourself with her. Could you ask the teacher for all the spellings in advance so you could identify which words aren't in her vocabulary?

I'm sorry if I've misjudged her SEN and this isn't possible. I do agree that spellings should be differentiated.

It's not attainable (and if she just cries instead of doing it, I'd argue it's not challenging either).

(Also, if she doesn't know any of the intermediate spelling patterns, it would be better to learn them systematically, rather than skip ahead. I'm pretty sure she doesn't know FF is a common way to spell F, so she needs that before she gets to "effect".

We gave up with spelling in y1/y2. They were far too hard for DD2, and totally pointless. She's y11 now. Her spelling isn't great, especially when tired, but it is passable.

My DD yr 2 has spellings which are way too hard for 90% of the class, it only serves to boost or crush self esteem, not teach them. The school doesn't teach them spellings, entirely up to home teaching. Completely pointless, they forget them in days. My DD has tests twice a week and feels sick every time, so I wrote to school and they offered her to just do 5 of the 10. I was sick of wasting my time teaching her words she doesn't always understand and will forget how to spell. Our time should be spent on reading, maths, getting the common words reliable, or heaven forbid it, play. We make an effort to genuinely learn 5.

@Smartiepants79

Spellings should be differentiated! We have up to 4 groups with different words for each group! I’m a teacher myself and I’d still Say this sounds a bit lazy. You need to flag it with school and see what they say then go from there.

I agree with the above poster. The 'lazy' part of teaching spelling like this is that it isn't teaching - expecting children to memorise lists of words containing phonics they have not yet been taught is about as far away from explicit teaching of the alphabetic code as you can get. You won't find any research showing that sending word lists home like this works.

We don't send any words home, but we do explicitly teach the code right up to Y6. Our children outperformed children nationally in 18 out of 20 words in the last spelling test.

We had the same issues with DD and we’re told the same rubbish as @bettycat81 has been told.
We just said that we were not going to learn the harder versions of the spellings they were given, but that I’d teach her the easier version and how the spelling rules applied.

We had to do a similar thing in maths, as that was too difficult too.

Her spelling is now amazing much better than mine!
She’s still not that academic, but doing better and we just moved her to a school where they differentiated the work in keeping with their abilities.

affect/effect isn't mentioned on the National Curriculum until the Year 3/4 section and even then it isn't statutory. Tell school she is becoming very distressed with the school spellings, you have paid for a spelling app that she is happy to use (and is making progress on) and you are trying the school spellings.
Get her to paint, chalk, write in water, make out of card etc the school spellings so she can honestly say she has tried them. Then just focus on the more appropriate spellings.

We'll be on a hiding to nothing getting her to do extra spellings as well as the ones on her app - I just don't want her distressed if she's being told she MUST do the school spellings and MUST tell mummy and daddy to do them. 7 year olds are very susceptible to emotional blackmail.

School have a good reputation for SEN which translates as "we know how to do most things but if you question us you are definitely wrong and we can't help your child" - they off-rolled DS saying he had a learning disability because he was refusing to do work for most of most days, and was just escalating up their behaviour chart and spending most of the day in time out. So not surprisingly he didn't learn anything.

(Though we could open up the spelling list and say "here's your spelling list DD" and close it again and tell them we've "looked at them", she's not savvy enough to understand that the teachers will think we've done something different to what we actually did).

@drspouse

(Also, if she doesn't know any of the intermediate spelling patterns, it would be better to learn them systematically, rather than skip ahead. I'm pretty sure she doesn't know FF is a common way to spell F, so she needs that before she gets to "effect".

So surely you go through her spellings at the beginning of the week, making her aware of things such as ff. she then has the rest of the week to practise them before her spelling test. I agree that after all of the school children have missed, putting her back even further may not be a good idea, and she should be attempting the class spellings.

Would the school be willing to do differentiated spellings if you asked?

My DC1 is in Year 5. His spelling is terrible.
We had a talk with the school a year or two ago about the spellings they were sending home - sounds like a similar scenario to yours, the spellings were much too hard, he couldn’t manage any of them, and he still couldn’t consistently spell most easy high frequency words correctly.
His teacher said that they had to cover all the spelling rules, regardless of whether a child was several years behind on their spellings, so that they didn’t go into the Year 6 SATs having never even looked at the more complicated spelling rules.
But the teacher spoke to the head teacher, and the school did agree to give DC1 differentiated spelling lists. I’m still not entirely sure why they needed the head teacher’s permission for this.
But anyway, the result is that now DC1 gets spelling lists that are a mixture of the harder words that are standard for his year group, and easier words from younger year groups that he’s more capable of learning. They’ve also put him in some sort of spelling intervention group.

We have the same problem with our year 3 child with SEN. I have brought it up with the teacher (who is perfectly nice and competent) and she just shrugged and said they are allocated words that they have to cover each year. How ridiculous!

We have stopped doing them. DD reports it's not unusual for most of the class to get 5 or fewer out of 20.

I'm a sixth form teacher and spend a lot of time with my students teaching subject specific vocab in context but learning random lists of words is not how they are retained.

Try and get her teacher on board, we had this and it became so stressful! In the end I said that we would focus on those words I thought ds could learn, so perhaps 5 out of 10. He looked and read all the spellings, we used all the words sent home but focused on learning some but not all. When he went up to secondary school no issues with spelling were found. I think he found a huge list of words overwhelming and his brain just shut off.

If you want a bit of fun with it, mention Piaget's Zone of Proximal Development in the phone call. And keep reading books with DD about things that actually interest her - I'm sure that's a good way to learn to spell.

Also a good half of my sixth formers use effect and affect interchangeably (once in a while I break off from the economic theory and teach them).